Mr. Chairman, that is the change. Therefore $700 million will be added to the base over five years.
I want to quote from General Mike Jeffery who is here today. When he was at a conference in Ottawa in February, he was asked “Where is the additional money to cover army operations going to come from”. He replied:
“It's not coming from anywhere“. Like a family where the wife loses her job, he said, we are cutting in order to find what is most important. “We are deficit financing”, he says, and we can't go on like this much longer. “We have too much army for the budget”.
Yet he noted that the effort to organize the army into a lighter, more mobile and high tech force would cost more money to implement than to stay as they were.
I would like to ask the minister about that. General Jeffery said, which was one way of putting it, that it was too much army for the budget. Another way of putting it is that it is too little budget for the army. Which does the minister think better represents the situation?